A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism by Peter Mountford

From Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April 2011.

Having just been hired as an equities analyst by a notoriously rapacious hedge fund, the Fallon Group, 27-year-old Gabriel Francisco de Boya embarks on his first assignment in the field. Set entirely in La Paz at the end of 2005, when Bolivian people are electing their current president, Evo Morales, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism charts Gabriel’s attempts to generate profit from the country’s political transformation. In the face of fantastic financial incentives, he’s forced to confront his doubts about the ethical implications of the work he’s doing; he maintains a complex growing series of lies, including ones he tell to Morales's press liaison, Lenka Villarobles, with whom he has fallen in love.

A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is a look inside the often-misunderstood world of high finance and a thorough going exploration of ambition and class and the cash nexus of the unfettered free-market.

Winner of the 2012 Washington State Book Award in Fiction, and finalist for the 2012 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism was also named a best book of the year by The Seattle Times, The Nervous Breakdown (as a winner of a 2011 "Nobbie"), Crosscut, Culture Mob, and elsewhere.

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Reviews for A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

"This is Mountford’s triumph: he has created a commentary on
contemporary economics that is as moving and genuine as it is biting and
satirical...A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism will be remembered as a touchstone work of the Era of Twenty-First Century Economic Crises."

"Compulsively readable...Daringly allegorical and written with apt understatement, A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism appears
as a Trojan horse within the realm of contemporary literary fiction.
Mountford has the courage to depict a world in which personal lives
aren't really that personal."

"What a miraculous thing
Mountford has done. Gabriel is right on both counts. And wrong. That
polarity crackles in the heart of this novel, which is neither afraid to
feel deep sympathy for its tragic protagonist nor hesitant to judge him
harshly."

"In this dazzling debut novel, Mountford displays a gift for
characterization and a sure-footed grasp of financial matters that
enable him to guide a reader nimbly through the arcane vernacular of
Wall Street."

"In
his powerfully-written, quick-paced, and timely debut, Mountford shines
a hard light on today’s frantic financial amphitheater—a place where
morality is secondary to making a dollar and large companies can
sabotage entire countries."

"This is quite simply one of the
smartest and most readable debuts I’ve come across in years. Mountford
is a writer who rolls up his sleeves and digs into the zeitgeist all the
way up to his elbows. He’s fearless in his depiction of world leaders,
global events, and the oft-ignored gray areas between morality and
success."

"Peter
Mountford’s debut novel speeds off, down the crowded streets of La Paz.
If Graham Greene and Gordon Gekko collaborated on a South American
travelogue, it would go something like this...It turns out
'international markets and their political underpinnings' can be fun to
read about, after all."

"The
novel is a latter-day Graham Greene adventure, where a young
protagonist in a foreign land becomes deeply embroiled in financial
(instead of Greene's political) espionage, and must make decisions that
will affect the course of his own life as well as his host nation's.
This novel won great reviews, but may have slipped under your radar on
its release in May of 2011."

Advance Praise for A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism:

"Peter
Mountford’s striking debut novel is a smart and entertaining book. Set
near the peak of the financial bubble in 2005, the book charts the story
of a young financial journalist, Gabriel de Boya, recently hired as an
analyst for a notoriously unscrupulous hedge fund. Gabriel’s first
mission is a test of his abilities: go to Bolivia and find a way to
profit from the Bolivian presidential election. In Gabriel, Mountford
creates a complex, charismatic, and engaging character, a chameleon who
works himself into increasingly precarious positions as his mission is
both facilitated and complicated by his love affair with the Bolivian
president-elect’s press liaison.

In
Mountford's novel, the stakes of international finance and the personal
lives of those involved intersect in a beautifully drawn Bolivia. A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism accomplishes
that rare trick of being a book of ideas and politics while remaining,
at its core, a profoundly intimate, character-driven story and a
tremendously good read.

I highly recommend this captivating debut novel by a remarkably promising young writer."

- Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain in a guest author review for Amazon.com

"A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism
is a terrific debut novel—smart, moving, beautifully written. Peter
Mountford's parable of the voracious global economy reminded me of
Graham Greene's The Quiet American in its clear-eyed depiction of the
realpolitik of our age."

- Jess Walter, author of The Financial Lives of Poets and The Zero

"A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism
is, quite simply, one of the most compelling and thought-provoking
novels I’ve read in years. It’s extraordinarily vivid, populated by
characters whose fates I cared about desperately, beautifully written,
timely beyond measure, but above all it conveys—with impressive
precision and nuance—how we are vectors on the grid of global capital;
how difficult it is to even attempt to be an authentic, let alone
admirable, human being when we are, first and last, cash flow."

- David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead

"Peter
Mountford, in his amazing debut as a novelist, has updated the gilded
myth of Wall Street swashbucklers in expensive suits and spun it out
into the world in a hellbent tale, dramatizing the contorted
rationalizations practiced by the financial elite to justify their
self-delusion. Forget fame, respect, making the world a better place.
Transcend the craving for money by acquiring a truckload of it. Buddha
as a hedge fund operator, reallocating soullessness throughout the
system."

- Bob Shacochis, author of Swimming in the Volcano, and The Next New World

"A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism
is a brilliant debut novel, one that is generous in giving readers an
original cast of vividly-drawn and unforgettable characters, learned in
its knowledge of the interwoven worlds of finance and politics, sexy,
and thoroughly cosmopolitan. Peter Mountford is easily one of the most
gifted and skillful young writers, already accomplished, I have had the
pleasure of reading in many years."

- Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage and Dreamer

"In his debut novel, A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism,
Peter Mountford has something important to say about the ambiguous
moral ground where the personal meets the political. He has experience
and sophistication beyond his years and is well-positioned to mine this
vein. This novel is worth your time and attention."

- David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars

"Peter Mountford’s A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is
a sharp, funny and terrifying novel—in a world so much like our own
(part of the terror: it may, in fact, be our world), Gabriel’s actions
and the reactions of those around him caused me to wonder, again and
again: how do I wish to live in this world, and what latitude might I
find?"

- Peter Rock, author of My Abandonment

Watch the trailer for A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism by COS Productions